Sharaa confirms Syria is in direct talks with Israel, says no deal without withdrawal

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa confirmed that his country is in direct talks with Israel on reaching a new security agreement in the country’s south.

“We are engaged in direct negotiations with Israel, and we have gone a good distance on the way to reach an agreement,” Sharaa told The Washington Post in an interview published on Tuesday.

His comments mark the first time the Syrian leader has confirmed the discussions with Israel.

Syria’s official state news agency said in August that the two sides were engaging in direct discussions. US envoy and ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack has been mediating between them. 

Syria and Israel do not have formal relations. In 1967, Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria and illegally annexed the territory.  However, under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, they signed a disengagement agreement that established a security regime on their border.

After Sharaa and his Islamist forces ousted Hafez’s son, Bashar, from power in late 2024, Israel invaded southern Syria and occupied a United Nations buffer zone there. Over the summer, Israel launched powerful air strikes that reached the capital, Damascus.

Sharaa said Israel had conducted over 1,000 air strikes in Syria since 8 December 2024, when Bashar's government collapsed.

“Because we want to rebuild Syria, we didn’t respond to these aggressions,” he told The Washington Post.

Sharaa said that Israel’s claim it was targeting Shia militants with ties to Iran was false, noting that “we are the ones who expelled those forces out of Syria”.

“The advances that Israel made into Syria are not coming from [their] security concerns but are coming from their expansionist ambitions,” he said.

Israeli aggression

Israel is establishing itself on Syria’s Mount Hermon, the highest peak in the region. It has also sought to portray itself as a defender of Syria’s Druze minority by backing Druze leader Sheikh Hikmat Salaman al-Hajri with arms in the region, experts say.

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Sharaa said that to finalise any agreement, Israel must withdraw its troops from the territory occupied since 8 December. That would effectively leave the issue of the Golan Heights to be resolved later. But analysts say Israel has shown no willingness to remove its troops. 

“A security agreement will happen. It’s just a matter of time,” Dareen Khalifa, an expert at the International Crisis Group, told Middle East Eye for a previous article. 

“The Israelis will need to give something, but there will be flexibility in terms of a withdrawal," she added. 

Over the summer, when fighting broke out between Druze and Bedouins, Israel prevented Sharaa from deploying his mainly Sunni security forces to the south. The intervention upset Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Trump administration. 

Israel says it wants the entirety of southern Syria “demilitarised”, a move that would effectively prevent Sharaa from deploying security forces within Syrian sovereign territory. He rejected that demand in his interview.

“To talk about an entire region demilitarised, it will be difficult, because if there is any kind of chaos, who will protect it? If this demilitarised zone was used by some parties as a launching pad for hitting Israel, who is going to be responsible for that?”

Sharaa said that US President Donald Trump “supports our perspective as well”, and said he left his meeting at the White House confident that the US will “push as quickly as possible in order to reach a solution”.